New Plays

The Immortal Thief. Last season, Mr. Hampden revived Kennedy's The Servant In The House. This season he begins with Tom Barry's The Immortal Thief in a continued effort to reconcile once closely related religion and drama. Perhaps it is because Mr. Hampden's particular symbols of religious fervor are alien to modern audiences that his efforts fail to win popularity.

The Immortal Thief originates in the New Testament account of the crucifixion. In Walter Hampden, innately a scholar and a gentleman, it is difficult to see a tigerish outlaw of harsh Jerusalem. Yet there he is, leaping to good, plunging into evil, denying the gods, always thinking of them, a strange duality of ruthless passion and grand sacrifice. He breaks a fellow thief's legs, cuts off the hand of another, supposedly traitorous. To atone for his cruelty, he sacrifices himself to save a girl, unloved, who adores him. Salvation comes at the end in a fiercely realistic crucifixion tableau. It is all deeply sincere, beautifully staged. Claude Bragdon's sets and lighting effects startled the audience into frequent gasps of admiration. Yet to many the play seemed more of pulpit than of theatre.

The Jeweled Tree. Before Pogany's sets, an Egyptian fantasy unrolled itself out of Tut-Ankh-Amen vestments. Once upon a time Prince Rames sallied forth to possess himself of the fruit of the tree. And did. Authentic folklore it is, with talking alligators --scholarly, picturesque, but apparently not the thing to engross an audience.

Black Boy. Into the brutality of a prizefighter's camp strays a giant Negro, peaceable, with song in his heart. Paul Robeson, one-time (1918) all-American end, star basketball player, Phi Beta Kappa, of Rutgers College, more recently famed concert singer, enacts the role of the black boy. The white man's ways force him into the fight game. Swiftly the hungry straggler mounts to world championship, hangers-on, Fierce-Arrows, booze, kotowing, all the tinseled impedimenta. After two years of demoralizing opulence, double-crossed by his manager, disillusioned by the discovery that his idolized Irene is tinged with black blood like his own, he forsakes the devious paths of Harlem, seeks out the sunny slopes of California, wanders away again, a singing hobo.

The triteness of Jim Tally's plot, exaggerated coarseness of language, superficiality of dialogue, are more than offset by two redeeming features: the authentic note (struck most poignantly when Actor Robeson sings the spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child") of the Negro's inability to find himself in complicated mazes of the white world; and Mr. Robeson's personality. His organ-like voice croons, booms in husky, mellow tones filled with all the languor and ebullience of his naive race. In the third act he appears stripped to the buff--an Apollo in black marble, a sight for any sculptor. Across the footlights prejudice turns to admiration. Black Boy, with the debased morale of the U. S. Negro, can see no beauty in his own people. Even passion withers when his sweetheart is revealed a yellow girl. But Paul Robeson, personally, shines forth unashamedly black, true to the best of his own.

The Good Fellow. Loud guffaws burst from the uninitiated at the Playhouse as the solemn ritual of the Ancient Order of Corsicans (WilkesBarre Chapter), in red, green, pink, orange and intermediately tinted regalia, is profanely bared to view. The Grand Napoleon of this kaleidoscopic outfit, one Jim Helton, blinded by the radiance of Corsicans and similarly bonded brotherhoods, loses sight of some immediate obligations of the family man. Thus he precipitates a sad domestic mess far less interesting than the burlesque business. Clara Blandick excels as a George Kelly-ish mother-in-law who blasts the exclusive poppycock of secret Corsicans with wise cracks that assail its sacred plumes, its haberdashery, even its sacrosanct initiation paddle. Although not a little hokum has been mixed with the satire to give that bitter-sweet flavor, the chances are that attendance at lodge meetings will fall off somewhat in and about Manhattan. Treat 'Em Rough. The harder Tony Barudi hits his women, the better they like it. But such abject adoration fails utterly to inspire true love in Tony's breast. So it remains for Nora O'Hare to brave the cabaret environment, beard the fierce Tony with laughter, thus reduce him to a pliant lover. Genevieve Tobin presents some five thousand good reasons for the fame enjoyed by Erin's colleens in song and legend. The Italian concession has been awarded to William Ricciardi whose sunshine bursts upon all with typical, gratifying exuberance. Unfortunately, the play follows hackneyed lines.

The Lion Tamer. Savoir's philosophical satire, first of the Neighborhood Playhouse repertory, employs a lion tamer as symbol of law, force, oppression; and a leisurely Englishman as symbol of reason, justice, revolt. Lord Lonsdale's great and hereditary desire is to behold his natural-born enemy, the tamer, eaten by the lions. But the lions do not chew their oppressor. They lick him with gentle tongues. In despair, his Lordship surrenders the faith of his fathers, turns lion tamer, and is himself eaten by Sultana and the other kittens. But Lord Lonsdale's son takes up the traditional family standard, so the poor old world goes on much as it did before, with its good and evil, oil and water, Mussolini and Woodrow Wilson, landlord and tenant, Tacna and Arica. The Playhouse cast intelligently interprets a play which cannot be described as subtle.